Professor David Huxley's Laborious, Licentious, Spotted-Leopard Labor Day Film Quiz

Anyone interested in great film criticism has almost certainly heard of Dennis Cozzalio and his blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. And anyone who has perused SLIFR knows of his massive film quizzes that are as delightful as they are deeply flummoxing to those without a strong knowledge of film history. In fact, this latest quiz, is the first I've ever been able to actually participate in without skipping every other question, and I still had to pass on two. But since I finally could respond to the majority, I decided to provide my own answers for once.

1) Classic film you most want to experience that has so far eluded you.

I've never seen a Preston Sturges film, though I'm getting two in the mail from Netflix this week.

2) Greatest Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release ever

Considering Seven Samurai would be my choice for what's out right now, I'll hold off until the Blu-Ray comes out and the film's restoration meets all those great extras.

3) The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon?

One has Lauren Bacall. The other doesn't. The Bacalls have it.

4) Jason Bateman or Paul Rudd?

Paul Rudd. He's got so much charm he can get away with anything.

5) Best mother/child (male or female) movie star combo

Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis are the only pair that comes readily to mind.

6) Who are the Robert Mitchums and Ida Lupinos among working movie actors? Do modern parallels to such masculine and no-nonsense feminine stars even exist? If not, why not?

The thing about Mitchum et al. is that they were great actors but also relied on their personae when on-screen. I think it's harder now for an actor to prove talent with the same type of role, as the people who become stars just for being them (Will Smith, Tom Cruise, etc.) are judged by box office and not how they come off as a screen presence. Maybe it's because we know so much about celebrities' private lives now that we've gotten our fill of the real people elsewhere.

7) Favorite Preston Sturges movie

See number 1.

8) Odette Yustman or Mary Elizabeth Winstead?

Winstead all the way. She was in danger of getting boxed in as a scream queen, but she's different in every movie I've seen her in and when people really take note, she'll get her overdue stardom.

9) Is there a movie that if you found out a partner or love interest loved (or didn't love) would qualify as a Relationship Deal Breaker?


I think if I couldn't impress upon someone the joy that The Red Shoes brings me that I just wouldn't have any way to communicate with them emotionally. No, seriously.

10) Favorite DVD commentary

My favorite serious commentary is Michael Jeck's gargantuan piece on Seven Samurai, which provides such a wealth of technical information and social context that it makes one of the greatest works of all time even richer. My favorite laid-back track is the one for Mallrats, Kevin Smith's misguided mall caper. I like Smith but have never gotten on with the film, but the commentary is maybe the funniest thing I've ever heard, as the cast and crew lovingly mock every aspect of the film. Ben Affleck "bemoans" the black spot on his then-hot career as he looks back with Oscar in hand, while Smith, master of self-deprecation, works off of Affleck's tongue-in-cheek jabs to insult the film further.

11) Movies most recently seen on DVD, Blu-ray and theatrically

Blu-Ray/DVD: Eastern Promises, Anchorman Theater: Piranha 3D

12) Dirk Bogarde or Alan Bates?

Alan Bates

13) Favorite DVD extra

One of the gargantuan documentaries that Charles de Lauzirika has made, specifically his Blade Runner piece.

14) Brian De Palma’s Scarface— yes or no?

I'm not that keen on it, but we'll see how I view it in the context of De Palma's filmography as my retrospective continues. I do still enjoy it.

15) Best comic moment from a horror film that is not a horror comedy (Young Frankenstein, Love At First Bite, et al.) This isn't a traditionally funny moment, but when they decapitate Ash in Alien and that milky stuff shoots out instead of blood, I laughed even as I jumped from being startled. It was just such an odd way to communicate that he was an android (and of course something that ties into the sexual undertones of the film) that I let out a laugh in my yelp.

16) Jane Birkin or Edwige Fenech?

Pass

17) Favorite Wong Kar-wai movie


In the Mood for Love, though Chungking Express and Fallen Angels compete for the top spot.

18) Best horrific moment from a comedy that is not a horror comedy

I think the "There's been a rape up there!" moment in the original Office is one of the most blood-freezing things I've ever seen in a comedy. But that's television, so to take from the movies, surely it must be the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom!

19) From 2010, a specific example of what movies are doing right…

Having seen so few of the films that I want to see this year, I can only speak on this vaguely, but there's been some great examples of films telling their stories visually. The Ghost Writer is evidence of this, making do with spare, suggestive dialogue and then using the meticulous mise-en-scène to tell you what you need to know.

20) Ryan Reynolds or Chris Evans?

Reynolds. I don't understand what some have against his sarcasm. He's not a comic genius, but I have genuinely laughed at some of his cracks where so many stars seem to expect you to laugh accommodatingly to their bad jokes.

21) Speculate about the future of online film writing. What’s next?

Hopefully, it will continue to foster intelligent discussion, and maybe the balance will swing from the Rotten Tomatoes community to more thought-out writing. Then again, that's pretty wishful thinking. More likely, criticism as a gig that pays anything at all will bottom out, festivals will go online to accommodate the pockets of cinephiles who can no longer afford to go anywhere and the gap between true love of film and box office worship will widen until some New New Wave comes along, one hopes, to get people interested in art again.

22) Roger Livesey or David Farrar?

With only a few examples of each, Roger Livesey, essentially for no other reason than Colonel Blimp.

23) Best father/child (male or female) movie star combo

Kirk and Michael Douglas. The end. I still don't know how Michael seemed to pick up exactly his father's talents -- unrepentant slimeballs you can't help but root for because of who's playing them.

24) Favorite Freddie Francis movie (as Director)

Pass

25) Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth?

Bringing Up Baby

26) Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig?

It's hard to say. Fey is a better writer, but Wiig is one of the best comedians out there right now. I think I'm more drawn to her whenever she's on-screen in anything than I am to Fey even as Liz Lemon, so I'll side with Wiig.

27) Name a stylistically important director and the best film that would have never been made without his/her influence.

Michael Powell, who is responsible for, you know, every Martin Scorsese movie. But, to narrow it down, Raging Bull wouldn't have been made without Powell, especially because the man helped out during production.

28) Movie you’d most enjoy seeing remade and transplanted to a different culture (i.e. Yimou Zhang’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop.)

I nearly said a modern American version of Playtime, but then the point of that movie is that, in modern times, all countries have been culturally homogenized, and the US is responsible for that. So perhaps what I'm saying is that I want a mandate forcing Americans to watch Playtime.

Instead, I'll say that a version of The Rules of the Game with Wall Street billionaires ignoring the financial collapse might be a bit fun.

29) Link to a picture/frame grab of a movie image that for you best illustrates bliss. Elaborate.

I'll do you one better. Here's an entire sequence that illustrates bliss. It's from Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, in which Faye Wong falls for a depressed cop and breaks into his apartment to clean the place to cheer him up. As Wong dances about the place like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before that type became a facile prop, her own version of The Cranberries' song builds into pure joy. I've never watched this scene and not felt just flushed and relieved by the end of it.

30) With a tip of that hat to Glenn Kenny, think of a just-slightly-inadequate alternate title for a famous movie. (Examples from GK: Fan Fiction; Boudu Relieved From Cramping; The Mild Imprecation of the Cat People)

Apocalypse At Your Earliest Convenience

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

With the recent demise of At the Movies, various clips of classic arguments, pans and raves have received regular play on blogs. One of the most frequently cited, and truly one of the finest moments of the program, is the hilarious split between Siskel & Ebert for the abysmal early '90s comedy Cop and a Half. Siskel, essentially speaking for the nation, hated the film, and his open-faced astonishment at Ebert's thumbs up conveyed the collective reaction of the audience. Cop and a Half became an occasional reference point in the pair's arguments for the last five years of their partnership, possibly replacing Siskel's fondness for fat jokes when looking for an easy jab at his rival.

Yet Ebert's obstinate refusal to feel bad about liking the film, even years later, reveals something important about dumb comedies: if you laugh, you've got to give them a positive write-up. And, God help me, few contemporary screen comedians make me laugh as hard as Will Ferrell. Yes, dear reader, he does the same thing in every film, and at times his shtick wears dangerously thin, but when he works, he works brilliantly. There's something enticing about coiled-spring comedy, in which a mild-mannered individual calmly reacts to the world until suddenly exploding in pent-up rage. Some excel at this (John Cleese, Jason Lee), others simply come off as deranged (Adam Sandler, to a lesser extent Chris Farley). Ferrell is one who can manage it, presenting a thick-headed veneer of unflappable confidence and pride until someone finally points out what a fool he is, setting in motion the eruption.

With Ron Burgundy, Ferrell has a prime vehicle for communicating this talent. Set in the '70s, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy draws a broad caricature of a man with the intersecting lines of the "Me Generation" and the egotistical realm of the TV personality. Ron Burgundy doesn't do any reporting or fact-checking; furthermore, he seems barely literate, only just capable of reading what's placed on a teleprompter without ever stopping to make sure what is scrolling is correct or even logical. All he has going for him is a mustache made for television, and he acts like the arbiter of truth.

Anchorman, despite being set a decade later and being released four years earlier, almost seems like a preemptive parody of Mad Men: Ron, along with his chauvinist colleagues Champ (David Koechner), Brian (Paul Rudd) and functionally retarded Brick (Steve Carell), act remarkably like Don Draper and co. They drink in the office, act as if no law can bind them and hit on every woman in the office as if there solely as a sexual outlet. So self-absorbed are the men that, when the program's boss (Fred Willard) tells the gang that the network wants more "diversity" on the news staff, Ron believes that the word refers to "an old, old wooden ship from the Civil War era."

Casting Christina Applegate as Veronica, the ambitious reporter who benefits from this rearrangement, was a stroke of genius. Applegate's talents can be hit and miss, but when she's on, she can throw back anything chucked at her by a gaggle of male comedians, even when playing the stereotypically career-driven woman who just needs the love of a boorish man to set her on the "proper" life track of a woman. That aspect of the film is as much a joke as anything else, and it's nice that Applegate's most absurd moments involve her falling for an idiot like Ron instead of the film ever trying to sell this as a positive view of relationships.

There is an intense danger in attempting to tie higher aims to films with such Neanderthal premises, but this goofy vision of '70s local news has a smart side to it. Anchorman's placement as the first in the incomplete "Mediocre American Man" trilogy was fortuitously timed to the celebration of mediocrity and incompetence that defined the zeitgeist of the Bush administration, and Bush provided Ferrell with his biggest break on Saturday Night Live. Looking back, the endless jokes on Bush's stupidity that Ferrell conveyed during the 2000 campaign seem frothy and lightweight, little jabs thrown at a man with not much background to speak of even as the governor of a state. But jump forward eight years to Ferrell's taped one-man show, in which he trotted out the Bush character for one last run before sending him out to pasture (or behind a shed). You're Welcome America had the same focal point -- Bush's astonishing ignorance even after eight years on the job -- but what had once been cheeky now seemed vicious and outraged. No longer was Ferrell amused that a moron was running for high office; now he couldn't believe that the country had allowed such a man to run riot for nearly a decade. (In the final scene, Anchorman takes this one step further by saying that Brick would go on to be one of Bush's top advisers, an act that both homages Animal House and caters to this admittedly stretched view of the movie.)

This film, made in 2004, conveys some of that disgust, far removed as it is from politics. The outrage over a woman penetrating the homoerotic inner circle ("It is anchor-MAN, not anchor-LADY, and that is a scientific fact!" screams a belligerent Champ) shows men acting like children. Nearly all of the film's humor stems from jokes at Ron's expense, from his arrogance that is unjustified by either physical attractiveness or mental acuity to his dated belief in what's proper for women. Veronica fights to be seen as an equal, resenting the fluff pieces she gets assigned to by sexist bosses, but Ron's stories are no more important. Only Ron's gravitas makes his items seem vital, but he reports on water-skiing squirrels and the odd wild animal sighting. If this film comments on the pride Americans take in ignorance, then this angle can be seen as an attack on the vacuity of news programs and their perennial inability to cover relevant topics in favor of pandering to the broadest demographic for ratings. The Channel 4 news team thinks a panda giving birth is national news in the wake of Watergate, just as CNN now devotes increasingly less time to anything important and flounders about looking for some trite human-interest piece to save ratings. Hell, even the hysterical rivalry between news channels (other factions led by Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, even Tim Robbins) resembles the incessant pissing contest between 24-hour news channels, and Channel 4's pure arrogance and pride for their drivel matches Fox's own.

Oh, but why weigh down the film with such a reading when its enjoyment lies in its absurdity and its endless one-liners? Quite so, but I believe that Anchorman's cleverness runs deeper than its surface titters. Satire, it ain't, but out of all the pictures put out by Adam McKay and his various collaborators in the subset of the Apatow talent pool, this is by far the most fully realized and insanely re-watchable, precisely because there's some overarching plan to all of this. It may not be an expulsion of the filmmakers' political angst, but the derth of a point that makes Talladega Nights only intermittently entertaining is wholly absent here. Apart from an ending that must surely have come to the gang while under the influence of controlled substances, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy remains one of the funniest and best-cast comedies of the last decade, so funny that even a long-ass collection of outtakes could be haphazardly fashioned into a "sequel" that is also riotous. Maybe it can rise no higher than the status of "lazy Sunday" film, but aren't the movies just so much better when they bring you out of boredom anyway? Stay classy.

Piranha 3D

If you see only one movie this year featuring a man's penis being eaten by a ravenous horde of prehistoric fish, by golly make it this one. Piranha 3D is not a sequel to the old, schlocky franchise so much as a reboot of the first film, itself a blatant ripoff of Jaws. Thus, when Richard Dreyfuss shows up in the first scene of the film singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home," director Alexandre Aja instantly crystallizes what the film has to offer: a tension at all times undercut by a wry point-of-view.

This is only exacerbated when Dreyfuss' character, sloshing about on a wee fishing boat, drops a beer bottle into the lake, and somehow the light touch of a sinking bottle setting down on a lake bed already covered with litter causes an earthquake that frees a horde of prehistoric piranhas trapped in a hidden reservoir for millions of years. Anyone who would point to this as highly unlikely is just being an asshole.

The unleashing of a swarm of killer fish into Lake Victoria coincides with Spring Break, and the family-friendly throngs of visitors of Amity Island cannot compare to the bikini-clad, hosed-down nymphets and Axe body spray-gargling frat boys who turn the place into an orgy with awful, awful music for a week. In this frenzy, it's difficult to make out the locals, who conveniently do not have to book hotels to get front-row seats to more wet t-shirt contests than you can shake a beer bong at. Yet poor Jake Forester (Steven R. McQueen) immediately stands out as someone who did not elect to come here, an awkward teen who looks disappointed that his sheriff mother (Elizabeth Shue) won't allow him to join in any of the fun but seems the sort of fellow who wouldn't enjoy all the partying if he did manage to get into the fracas.

For the first 45 or 50 minutes, Aja makes a noble stab at actual suspense. He gives us enough shots of people swimming and narrowly escaping a horrid death they do not perceive to inject tension into the film. Even as he sets up the absurdity's of Jake's plot -- sneaking out of babysitting duty to show a Joe Francis-like, amateur pornographer (Jerry O'Connell) the hot spots of the area while his love interest Kelly tags along in the most awkward manner possible -- the director shamelessly manipulates the 13-year-old that lingers in the minds of the overwhelmingly male demographic to whom this film appeals. In between every shot of bared breasts is another amusingly clichéd moment of horror that knows how silly it is but tries to make us jump anyway.

Then, Aja just goes mental. Not coincidentally, the tipping point lines up with an appearance by Christopher Lloyd, who gives one of the most inexplicably knowledgeable chunks of expository dialogue this side of a John Carpenter movie. His urgent gasps set up the next sequence, one of the most insanely gory setpieces I have ever seen. As with Jaws, the people splash about, unaware that anything's wrong, and when the sheriff learns about the piranhas and attempts to close the lake, the invading youth ignore her commands pay her no mind.

Where Piranha 3D breaks from Jaws is that Spielberg's film involved but a single giant killer, a beast that could only attack a single person at a time. But a swarm of thousands of tiny fish can converge upon multiple victims. Armed with a surprisingly sophisticated effects team, Aja stages a grand-scale carnage that comes to resemble less a rip-off of Spielberg's masterpiece than the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Dozens of large-breasted (female and male, to be honest) undergrads find themselves stripped away in seconds. The scale of prosthetics involved in this project, from legs reduced to a few clumps of jagged flesh hanging off entirely exposed bones to scalped swimmers caught in the blades of self-centered individuals who power their boats to shore without helping anyone. In seconds, the hints of camp erupt into outright frenzy, but there's enough carnage on the screen that even the director has to take a step back every now and then to retain his humanity.

It's understandable that the studio would hold the film from a critical screening, what with the sight of several porn stars hired to present their wares before dying horrible deaths and the stiff dialogue. However, the actions of the studio demonstrate their own lack of faith in the project, as Piranha 3D is so well-made and so self-aware without being aloof about it that it instantly appeals to the cinephile's love of the trashier side of things. Aja cares primarily about boobs and blood here, but the staging of the film, right down to its deliberately and appropriately kitschy use of 3D, is so cheeky yet knowing that the film is destined to be a party favorite for cinema lovers looking for something to help them unwind as it will be for junior high school lads who will make sure their parents are out of the house before whipping out (so to speak).

The cast works brilliantly, from Lloyd's Sam Loomis-esque pseudoscience to Adam Scott's seismologist diver, refreshingly cowardly at first instead of conducting himself with unbelievable poise. O'Connell has an absolute blast playing Derrick, and you can see him in scenes actively trying to make you hate him before the fall. The younger actors don't have the same experience, but they acquit themselves nicely for a film that only needs them to create a focal point for the disparate scenes of carnage. But it's Elizabeth Shue who carries the film, instantly conveying a bad-ass demeanor that is thankfully never sullied by moments of woe-is-me sobbing, even when she faces the prospect of her children dying an unimaginable death.

Aja's choreographed bloodbaths rely on the same gore wizardry of George A. Romero's classic Dead films, which also had the power to make you laugh in spite of yourself even as you turned away in revulsion. Like Romero, Aja never gives in fully to the torture porn aesthetic, making sure to keep his softcore separate from his feeding frenzies. For him, the piranhas are not so different from the youth who descend upon the town. Both are finely tuned hive minds with a single purpose: for the humans, it is to get wasted and laid. For the fish, it's to feed. Don't expect any social satire, mind you, but there's an actual, working mind running this show.

Piranha 3D isn't particularly fulfilling viewing; in fact, it might just devour a part of your soul. But it manages to present its buckets of blood without being flippant about the comedy. Thus, no one scene of the film is completely hilarious without an undercurrent of stomach-churning disgust under it, but it's nice that a horror-comedy can program that disgust into its makeup rather than simply engendering it in the audience. Still, be sure to bring some friends along to make everything that much wilder.


P.S. James Cameron said that this film's use of 3D was gimmicky. What he fails to understand is that 3D is a complete gimmick, and Aja's use of it as such is so much cleverer and more enjoyable than the admittedly (far) superior use of the technology in Avatar. Please, keep giving me films that know 3D is crap instead of the ones acting like it's the next great leap forward despite being 50-year-old technology.

Tetro

As overstated as Francis Ford Coppola's fall from grace may be, there's no denying that he never hit the same heights as his series of '70s films, in which he made four films, all four of which were masterpieces. It seemed as if, like all other filmmakers, Coppola himself couldn't top The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, and only brief flashes of inspiration -- Tucker, bits of Rumble Fish and Dracula, which I seriously and unfairly underrated and will soon revise -- pointed toward the genius that was. After spending a decade at his vineyard watching his daughter carve out a sizable amount of respect for herself, however, Coppola has reemerged, and the titan of New Hollywood became the unlikeliest of things: an independent. Youth Without Youth, a twisty, hugely ambitious feature, packed as many different types of movie -- time travel, WWII romance, philosophical meditation -- about reversed aging as David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Coppola did so with a fraction of the budget.

Taken with his latest feature, Tetro, Coppola's comeback places a particular focus on the actual beauty and meaning of creation, that is, the art of art. Youth Without Youth, a film about a man miraculously aged backwards and allowed a second chance at youth with the wisdom of an aged brain, could easily be a commentary on how digital photography, decreased actor salaries and an increasing ability to work outside the major studio system and still have a few million dollars to work with have given the director a second lease on artistic life.

Tetro takes this one step further. Semi-autobiographical in its story of an Italian-American family of gifted artists, Tetro is infused with the history of filmmaking in the same way that his Dracula was infused with the history of, well, damn near all of Teutonic artforms. Containing clips and extrapolated reinterpretations of Michael Powell's The Tales of Hoffmann and The Red Shoes, Coppola's latest is appropriately operatic, and bizarrely melodramatic in the Almodóvar tradition. Its tale of family rivalry and scorn will set tongues wagging over which character represents which celebrity in the fertile family tree of the Coppolas, but the structure here lends itself to something more universal, not so much impersonal as overseeing.

The film's title refers to one Angelo Tetrocini (Vincent Gallo), who takes on an abbreviation of his surname as he hides out in Buenos Aires suffering from writer's block. His much-younger brother, Benjamin (Aiden Ehrenreich) comes looking for him, but Tetro makes it immediately clear that, though his feud with his family never extended to his brother, his mere presence reminds him of what he left. Bennie, who also left military school to defy their father, works on a cruise ship so he can still wear an approximation of a naval uniform, and he uses his week-long furlough in Argentina to spend time with his brother, who lets him stay only at the urging of Tetro's girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdú).

Bennie, virginal and confused in a country full of people who speak an unfamiliar language, has all the more reason to hang on his brother while there, desperately trying to coax an explanation for why he never came back for the boy. It's clear that Tetro's resentment does not extend to Bennie, who's so similar to his older brother that the eldest snaps, "Don't do me, do you. I'll be me" when Bennie sarcastically refuses to answer questions to prove how irritating the silent treatment is. The last thing Tetro wants to be is a role model, though it's surprising that even his fresh-faced kid brother could do so. Gallo pours his reptilian ego into the role, a failed artist who holds onto his failure as if it had become his art, too proud to release it. He forbids Bennie from telling Miranda about their father and looks keen to send his brother back to America as soon as possible.

But Bennie stays, and his quest to dig up what drove his brother away and to uncover his own hidden past lead Coppola through a range of daring artistic devices. Shot mostly in high-contrast, digital black-and-white, Tetro lives and dies by the precise framing by the director and his cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., who also contributed to the beautiful compositions of Coppola's previous feature. The chiaroscuro mise-en-scène in Tetro is picturesque and provocative, not just emotionally but artistically: Tetro moves a mirror into place in his flat and the reflective effects allow for compounded compositions. When Bennie finally spills the beans about their father, a famous composer, to Miranda, the director cuts to Tetro frozen at the top of the stairs eavesdropping, shooting in deep focus to capture the stairs stretching behind and below the man in Expressionistic suggestion. The influence of the Germans is only exacerbated as the scene wears on and Tetro shouts down his brother as the camera remains on Bennie's face as the shadow of his brother bears down on him like Count Orlock.

When combined with the open quotation and literal presentation of Michael Powell's movies, the influence of Expressionism on Tetro opens up the true heart of the picture. Consider the outright usage of footage from Hoffmann: that was Powell's attempt to bring opera into the cinematic medium in a way that could only exist in that medium (much as The Red Shoes did for ballet). Coppola's features have always been operatic, especially his treasured Godfather series, but even his '80s youth movies have an unabashed melodrama, if the chief influence there -- making the logical step backwards in age and maturity -- is the musical and not opera. Here, as with Youth Without Youth, Coppola utilizes the broad emotions and half-cooked plot of the story to drive larger statements about art.

Tetro fled his father for being controlling and egomaniacal, insisting to both his sons, "There's only room for one genius in this family." The tortured son plans to write a play about his abusive childhood, but he stalls in Buenos Aires, content to live in his failure and refusing to work on his project. And when Bennie discovers his brother's manuscripts and sets out to write an ending for the work, his attempt to finish his brother's play seems less a validation of art as a means to link people than simply the latest spiral in the cycle of appropriation and plagiarism in the family (their father Carlo having achieved stardom by ripping off his older brother).

As in The Red Shoes, the characters of Tetro define worth through artistic talents -- the composing father, the writing sons, the singing first wife and dancing second -- but they do not find much pleasure in them. Wünderkinds battle it out for supremacy while the older generations rot in the wake of their own power struggles. Amusingly, the Tetrocini family resembles a liberal arts version of the Corleones, waging an internal war in which soldiers are decorated with grants and caporegimes win Pulitzers. The mediating voice in this conflict is the critic, personified by a garishly self-absorbed woman known only as "Alone," the biggest critic in South America. Alone has constructed a warped empire of half-analytical, half-gossipy tabloids, and her carriage and fashion suggests what Anna Wintour might be like if she insisted that Vanity Fair promoted "serious" criticism without sacrificing its glitzy side. Tetro seeks her validation so that he can throw it in Carlo's face, and Coppola has a grand time sending up the academics who so dearly loved him in the '70s before treating him like a leper and forcing him into a 10-year hiatus.

All of this makes for a melodrama that recalls, of all people, Pedro Almodóvar -- Carmen Maura, who plays Alone, is one of the Spanish director's regulars. Among the artistic flourishes in the film are a drag/striptease version of Faust that Tetro ruins by heckling. And if anyone still thinks that this is a gritty look at a broken family, lines like "Do you know what love is in our family? It's a stab in the heart" should adjust one's thinking to the proper perspective. In Gallo, Coppola has a deliciously aloof figure who seems most at home when he's at his most uncomfortable; when Bennie sustains an injury and winds up in the hospital, Gallo believably sells a joking moment where he slyly insists that he's only visiting his brother because they shared the same hospital room. Verdú is, of course, gorgeous and radiates grace, the only party who can stand outside the action and attempt to salve all the opened wounds.

The true find, however, is Ehrenreich. Looking like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, Ehrenreich with his first major role also proves that he can tap into the same well of simmering, brooding talent that the older DiCaprio now exhibits regularly. I wonder if Coppola saw the young man this way, too, placing him in a cruise ship uniform at the start to play on Ehrenreich's heartthrob looks by way of a vague Titanic reference before scuttling him away from the ship and letting his chops take over. Some fault the film for not being emotionally plausible or resonant, which misses the point but is an understandable error when Ehrenreich's mere presence makes one invest in him.

Enamored as the camera is with Ehrenreich, however, Coppola never loses focus, even if the film has a broad thematic makeup. Tetro opens suddenly on an extreme close-up of a light bulb humming as a moth flutters about and bumps into the lamp, and bright lights routinely hypnotize both brothers. When they head to Alone's festival in Patagonia, the light reflecting off the mountains resembles the flashes of adoring cameras, and Tetro stares at this sight with such intensity that an epileptic fit looks imminent. Bennie, too, is drawn to bright lights as he digs deeper into his family history, and thankfully Tetro snaps out of his own fixation in time to help his brother. "You can't look at the light," he tells Bennie, and in that moment Coppola takes a unique approach to art. Most films present the light as the escape from the horrors of life, the filter that allows us to confront reality; for the director just now getting back to work, focusing too intently on the spotlight or the beam of a film projector simply blinds us. With a vision like that, Coppola might yet prove to be a fresh, emerging talent of 70.

Stuff I Like: Buckethead

(For a while now I've debated occasionally including posts not about specific films, albums or shows and to focus on broader subjects like an artist, an actor, stand-up comedian or writer. While director spotlights typically come in the form of retrospectives, everything else would be too sporadic and random for each little thing to get its own subject. So, to lump it all together into a loose collection of things that I enjoy, I present the lazily titled "Stuff I Like." No, it isn't clever. Yes, it therefore fits in nicely with the rest of this blog's content. I'm not quite sure of the format yet, and maybe there won't be a definitive one, listing must-haves for some subjects and going into a broader career analysis for others. We'll see how it goes.)


There comes in a time in every boy's life when he falls in love with the electric guitar. Not coincidentally, this usually coincides with the time that he falls in love with his penis, and the broad phallic overtones of the rock guitar line up nicely with initial forays into solo sexual gratification. While ladies certainly admire guitarists too, the support given to the most technical of guitarists -- the kind that play squeedling, noodling solos on metal albums -- is overwhelmingly young and male. Even older guys disparage the talents of Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani, dismissing them as "wankers for wankers," overgrown man-children who devoted so much time to learning the intricacies of arpeggios that they never bothered to find an actual groove.

I myself have emerged from an adolescence of worship at the heels of Malmsteen, Marty Friedman and, yes, Dream Theater, looking back on such obsessions with the same regret one days failed high school romances. While I can still enjoy some -- Shawn Lane had the jazzbo's gift for improv, Eric Johnson the bluesy groove and soaring melody, Steve Vai the compositional training under Zappa -- shred no longer particularly excites me. After all, someone can lock himself in a room for 10 hours and day and learn the most advanced techniques, but you can't teach feel.

The biggest exception, if you somehow couldn't figure this out, is Buckethead. Born Brian Carroll, Buckethead has the speed of Paul Gilbert (who actually taught him for a time) and the prolific output of Frank Zappa. Just a hair over 40, Bucky has already released 28 solo albums, a handful of demo compilations, several gargantuan box-sets, and has guested on enough albums to bring his total discography above 100 entries. And that's not even counting individual, non-album tracks like his Guitar Hero reworking of an old live jam named "Jordan."


Naturally, the sheer number of available albums translates to a whole lotta fluff, and numerous side-projects are so out-there even by the standards of a man who plays with a KFC button and Michael Myers-esque mask on his head that you can steer clear of certain groups wholesale. Yet Buckethead is truly one of the most gifted guitarists around, and if he needs someone to tell him when to leave songs on the cutting-room floor, the range of his output serves him well even when specific songs and even entire albums fall flat. However, that prolific nature also makes it difficult to get new fans to come aboard and not feel so overwhelmed that they move on to more manageable artists. So, here are 15 albums featuring the lanky virtuoso that showcase not only the best the guitarist has to offer but also the wide range of styles that keep me coming back long after I grow tired of other shredders.

1. Colma

Buckethead laid the smallest of hints at his softer capacities in the final track of his second album, Giant Robot, entitled "I Love My Parents." A soft number, it morphed from a lilting acoustic melody to a more orchestral sound that stood in sharp contrast to the sheer madness of his collected material to that point, save the ambient looping of his Death Cube K production Dreamatorium. But Colma is something else altogether: made for his mother to give her a relaxing album while recovering from colon cancer. The result is a sparse, deeply melodic album with haunting acoustics and gentle electric soling. The riff for opener "Whitewash" will sit with you for days, while the echoing acoustic snippet "Big Sur Moon" is as exciting as his fastest and most distorted freak-out. When he breaks out the electric, as he does for "Machete," the results are no less gorgeous. Previously, Buckethead's quieter moments were more processed and electronic, but he strips everything away here, revealing an emotional well that drives his playing more than the strange references to Japanese television and favorite basketball stars.

2. Population Override

While Colma may be my favorite and my go-to selection to woo the uncertain, Population Override likely comes the closest to being an objective "best" in Buckethead's canon. While not expressly stated, the mission of the album is clear to those in the know: rework the classic funk guitar masterpiece Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Buckethead cites Eddie Hazel as a prime influence, and this work, wisely avoiding the usual production wizardry put upon Buckethead albums, captures Hazel perfectly. Like Funkadelic's guitar god, Buckethead here manages to be both incendiary and subdued, crackling with technique to shame all who approach yet emotive enough to provide a hook (Hazel, after all, played the 10-minute title track to his own magnum opus as if eulogizing his mother through his guitar). Starting with the loose funk jam of "Unrestrained Growth," Population Override quickly transitions into the "Too Many Humans," a tune that manages to successfully recreate the best of Hendrix's style even with the much cleaner and more accurate style of Buckethead, without the jerking gear shifts of earlier stylistic leaps. "Humans Vanish" is delicate, while "A Day Will Come" has the edge of his heavier material while still retaining the album's flowing melody. Aided by keyboardist Travis Dickerson, finally stepping out from behind the producer's soundboard to lend a hand, Buckethead crafts his most complex and rewarding work to date, marrying the more contemplative side of Colma with an edge. By the time you get to the pure blues of the untitlted bonus track, you can scarcely believe that the guy behind Giant Robot could have made this.

3. The Dragons of Eden

Flanked by Dickerson and frequent drumming collaborator Brian "Brain" Mantia, Buckethead's The Dragons of Eden stands in sharp contrast to the old story about Bucky trying out for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and being rejected for failing to "kick a groove." To be fair to the Chilis, Buckethead, despite participating in so many groups, has always had a small sign around his neck reading "Does not play well with others." Even the great work he did with Praxis and Deli Creeps worked in part because the players didn't so much groove and bounce sounds off each other (Praxis especially with Laswell's programmed sonic collages). This album, however, shows Buckethead more in his element in a group where he is not the clearly dominant figure than he has ever been before. You could feel the discomfort before, but he's on fire here, working in perfect harmony with Dickerson and Mantia through a series of jams long enough to build on themes but short enough to prevent sliding into extending wanking sessions. Most of the songs are led by Dickerson's retro organs, but even he never launches himself too far ahead, simply venturing out as if a guide with a lantern and waiting patiently for his followers to make their way forward before advancing once again. We all knew Bucky could play and play with the best of them, but this album, made just in 2008, shows that he might finally be ready to be a true team player.

4. Decoding the Tomb of Bansheebot

Buckethead put out enough CDs in early 2007 to essentially set him for life, but he never flagged for a second, saving his finest offering that year for October. The title is pure Buckethead silliness, but the range of playing covered here rivals his much bigger box sets. A continuation of the underrated Pepper's Ghost, Bansheebot features more melodic playing after Buckethead had turned increasingly to more jam-oriented compositions. While an improvisational tone seeps in here and there, the seamless transitions and precisely plotted instrumentals sound as if the man actually sat down and thought about where each song would go beforehand. The key track, clearly, is "Sail On Soothsayer," a continuation of Buckethead's tributes to his Aunt Suzie. Like the original "Soothsayer," it's gorgeous and searing, restrained but passionate and among the most emotional work in his catalog.

5. Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) -- Praxis

The first outing by Bill Laswell's supergroup is at once their least focused and by far their best. Laswell, an accomplished bassist, stays in the other room producing here, letting Buckethead unleash with Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell of P-Funk fame as well as Brain, forging three separate professional relationships that have served the guitarist well. Here, they contribute to Laswell's collage, mashing up funk with heavy metal before dropping into dub and ambient and climbing out yet again. Only the single "Animal Behavior," the only track with vocals, sounds anything like something you've heard before, but the whole album is a wild ride that carries over the best of Buckethead's early eclecticism and marrying it to a sense of direction, however loose. You may find yourself covering your ears a mere second after bopping along to a beat, but this album keeps you guessing in the best possible way.

6. In Search of The

If I told you that everything you needed to know about Buckethead was in In Search of The, you'd probably be so grateful that you'd thank me and leave before I had the chance to finish my sentence, adding to no one in particular, "But it's a 13-CD set." Yep, not content to simply release multiple albums each year, Buckethead went for broke in 2007 with this gargantuan collection of jams performed entirely by the multi-instrumentalist. You name the facet of Buckethead's playing -- fast, soft, jazzy, avant-garde, joking, -- and it's here somewhere. If you balk at the prospect of including all of it on your iPod (an understandable wariness; I don't keep it all either), at least stick with the sixth volume of the set, opening with a 20-minute guitar solo that ranks as probably the most complicating playing of Bucky's career. The rest of the CD is a great deal funkier, and the ending jam is one of the more solid in the whole set.

7. Shadows Between the Sky

Even when the man takes a break for illness, he just can't help but work. Sidelined from touring with an unspecified disease, Buckethead did manage to put out three albums this year -- including yet another multi-disc set and an all-banjo album -- but by far the best is this, easily his finest mellow offering since Electric Tears. At times, Shadows Between the Sky flirts with post-rock (especially on the track "The Cliff's Stare"), and Buckethead here refines the melancholia that touched his previous work, A Real Diamond in the Rough, into something less downbeat yet more believably sincere. Shadows is already basking in the spotlight among Bucky fans who hold it to be one of his best works, and its status may well raise even further in the coming years.

8. Axiology -- Thanatopsis

Before The Dragons of Eden definitively proved that Buckethead could work brilliantly in a unit, there was Axiology, the second album by Thanatopsis (a trio also including Dickerson and drummer Ramy Antoun). The first album bore all the trademarks of the worst Buckethead collaborations: unfocused, competitive even in the forced interplay between artists. But Axiology smooths out these issues. While it's still largely an avenue for each player to show off, the album's greatly increased melody allows for actual songs. There's even a humility to Carroll's playing that only rarely creeps into his group work -- strangely, he seems cockier in the room with others than he does on many of his solo albums.

9. Electric Tears

It's easy to separate Buckethead's heavier material from his more mellow stuff, but the range of emotion displayed in his softer side should prevent people from lumping his albums into only two groups. Colma had a harder edge but was ultimately uplifting and serene. Electric Tears is at the other end of the spectrum: it's bleak, icy and borderline depressed (Shadows Between the Sky lies somewhere in-between, though closer to this). Even the extended solo "Padmasana," pushing past the 11-minute mark, is so insular that you wonder if it's not simply a four-minute tune that feels three times as long. Yet the beauty is undeniable, and Electric Tears can be as calming as it is ominous.

10. Octave of the Holy Innocents -- Jonas Hellborg

Jonas Hellborg wrote the book on bass, literally (two, in fact), and his collaborations with Shawn Lane rank as some of the finest fusion ever made. But this all-acoustic affair, made with Buckethead and drummer Michael Shrieve, lets go of the hyperspeed Indo-jazz that categorized Hellborg's work with Lane. Instead, the bassist sought to find a lighter side in a time when he felt depressed by the world around him (ironically, he named the album after the Massacre of the Innocents, the infanticide raged by King Herod hoping to prevent the coming of the savior). The trio works over Gregorian-style chants, running through both Medieval and Middle Eastern music while still banging out enough riffs and fretwork to sound almost like something you'd normally expect from Buckethead or Jonas. Hellborg knows how to bring out the best in people even as he allows them to demonstrate their skill like no other, and he clearly has a great time with a player of Buckethead's talents.

11. The Elephant Man's Alarm Clock

Cuckoo Clocks From Hell is still Buckethead's heaviest album, but it lacks the cohesion and drive of this album. Its centerpiece, a four-part number called "Lurker at the Threshold," winds, stop-starts and doubles back so often that it sounds as if it contains a dozen more parts, but it works in a way that no single track on Cuckoo does. Other shred numbers, including "Thai Fighter Swarm" and "Final Wars," never lose the melody as Bucky's freak-fests sometimes do, and "Bird With a Hole in the Stomach" proves a remarkably catchy tune complete with a more chord-heavy solo that gets you grooving. (Note: the final track ends at 3:14, followed by silence until 6:20 when a hidden track kicks in.)

12. Monsters & Robots

Colma snapped heads to attention, but the subsequent Monsters & Robots was the first Buckethead album to make any sense of his early sound. The hilariously nonsensical "Balled of Buckethead" establishes a screwball mythos for the guitarist, while "Jump Man" and "Nun Chuka Kata" propel his shredding to new heights, as does a rerecorded version of "Jowls." The ballad "Who Me?" isn't as convincing as the softer material on Buckethead's previous album, but it still scores amid the more metal-oriented material. Sure, there's a definite split between the Claypool-assisted jams and the more solo-oriented numbers, but Monsters & Robots is the first of Bucky's harder albums to work as a unit.

13. Bermuda Triangle

Yet another side of Buckethead's playing is the influence of hip-hop, more visible on collaborations than in his solo work, but Bermuda Triangle is easily his best foray into rap-oriented musicality. This is techno drums-'n-bass as played by a virtuoso, and it's every bit as hilarious yet enjoyable as you might think. I actually bop along to "Forbidden Zone," even after the guitar comes in and changes the flow of the song. "Bionic Fog," on the other hand, runs on a much sparser beat and works better as ambient music. This isn't what you'd first expect from Buckethead, despite his propensity for robot dancing and the amount of hip-hop in his Praxis work, among other collaborations. But the sea-oriented electronic beats of Bermuda Triangle manage to be as calming as Colma while giving you something to dance to.

14. Dawn of the Deli Creeps (Deli Creeps)

Buckethead's high-school band never managed to put out a proper album, yet they managed to create a buzz before disbanding, even impressing and influencing Mike Patton and his Mr. Bungle project. In 2005, the men got back together to finalize their old demos, and damned if the end result isn't terrific. The same mental wash that made so many of Bucky's early albums a chore is focused here by the equally off-the-wall contributions of vocalist "Maximum Bob," whose voice can jump octaves and delivery styles at any second. You can instantly hear what Patton loved about them, and they sound remarkably fresh for a group of guys getting together for a musical high school reunion.

15. Unison (with Shin Terai)

It's not entirely clear what producer Shin Terai has to do on this album with Buckethead, Laswell, Worrell and rhythm guitarist Nicky Skopelitis so ably holding things down that his programming touches seem unnecessary. Unison doesn't quite live up to its name, ceding control back and forth from Laswell to the guitarists rather than functioning as a whole, but the music they make is so damn good you won't care. Whatever direction the others take it in, Buckethead deftly swoops in like an eagle and tears everything apart, especially on "Dream Catcher," which he just destroys with his soloing. When the group finally does gel, however, as they do on "Tug of War," the groove they create could shake the bones out of you.

Miscellany -- standout tracks and works that didn't quite make the cut

Soothsayer - Crime Slunk Scene

A major live favorite, "Soothsayer" will prove why it's so beloved after only one listen. All of Crime Slunk Scene is damn listenable (it just missed the list), but nothing can top this loving tribute to Brian's aunt. Rooted in an alternately moving and groovy riff, "Soothsayer" transitions effortlessly through quieter passages and more intense expressions of pain. The solos are among the most complex and deep in the guitarist's canon, ranking up there with the material on Population Override, and even when he finally gives in to tapping and arpeggios he infuses his technical playing with passion. One of the five best things Buckethead has ever written.

Nottingham Lace - Enter the Chicken

Enter the Chicken was a misguided effort, something that looked great on paper -- match Buckethead with a series of vocalists suited to his brand of weirdness -- but failed in execution. Yet one track stood out, and unsurprisingly it was the instrumental. "Nottingham Lace" is one of Buckethead's finest moments, building off a slick groove into a fiery, mid-tempo solo that wisely builds to an expected tempo jump but never crosses the line, keeping the fast fingers in check even when they creep into the mix. That bottlenecking of technique gathers the emotion into a fine point, and the song's sudden end leaves you momentarily unsure what to do.

Jordan

I mean, it's "Jordan." Most people came to Buckethead because he tortured them so at the end of Guitar Hero II, yet they kept trying to play that damn thing because it was so enjoyable. Inserting a solo into the verse-chorus structure of the song turned a fun riff into the ultimate mini-summary of Buckethead's incredible ability, a shred-fest packed into four easy-to-digest minutes with infinite replay value. When Buckethead appeared with Guns 'N Roses, people were just confused, but this was his true arrival into the mainstream, even if he didn't stay there for long. How could he?

I Love My Parents - Giant Robot

This aforementioned ballad is so gorgeous I'm bringing it up again. It's weird that so arch an artist would make so plain his love for his family, but they've inspired his most beautiful work. I still can't believe my ears when I reach the end of the broadly comic Giant Robot and get to this.

Magua's Scalp - Pepper's Ghost

Pepper's Ghost was another album that narrowly missed the list along with Crime Slunk Scene and Albino Slug, but this track is the best of the bunch. Buckethead plays great metal guitar, but he doesn't particularly write great metal songs. This is not true, however, of "Magua's Scalp," opening on a thrash metal riff that gets your head banging before slowing down into a crunchy groove and amping up again. It's not the greatest example of Bucky's technique, but it shows how compelling he can be even in a harder context without relying on his fretwork.

Destroyer - Day of the Robot

One long-as-hell metal solo that comprises the parts of other solos laid over the main track, "Destroyer" is almost comical in its sonic overload of shredding goodness, and in my post-noodle worshipping days I listen to it in more of a tongue-in-cheek fashion. But Buckethead seems to intend it that way regardless, so why not kick back with it every now and then? A little masturbation, even the metaphorical kind, is good for the soul.

Death Cube K - Dreamatorim

I know it's weird to put a whole album here, especially since, if I was going to do that, I should have mentioned Crime Slunk Scene as a whole or maybe even Pepper's Ghost before this, but there's no way to discuss this ambient project with individual tracks. Future DCK works lacked the spark of this, but Dreamatorium is minimalism at its finest, a series of loops to drift you into a deep sleep, albeit one that might give you some dark dreams.

Brian De Palma: Carrie

Stories about young men seeking to enter "adulthood" are a dime a dozen, but the field of girls-becoming-women movies is notably less fertile. Perhaps it's because males consider themselves men when they shove themselves up a birth canal -- which raises all sorts of questions -- but womanhood gets defined through puberty as there is one facet of biological change that becomes immediately noticeable, and it's something no man ever wants to talk about. Even I stop dead in my tracks when any one of woman friends uses the phrase "on the rag" with such horrifying frankness that I get the urge to enlist in the military just so I can one day speak so casually of bleeding for an extended period of time.

Brian De Palma keenly understands how badly every man going into the theater never wants to think about menstruation, and he stages one of the funniest visual gags in the history of cinema right in the opening credits. After a short establishing scene of young women in a high school gym class, De Palma cuts to a slow-motion shot of these nubile teens in various states of undress, playfully teasing each other as the camera moves through them, finally settling on one girl, Carrie (Sissy Spacek). De Palma cuts to close-ups of Carrie as she rubs soap over her body, letting water slowly cascade off her legs, down her neck to her stomach. Then she moves to wash genitals, and she comes back with a bloody hand. In an instant, De Palma flips the male gaze and causes all the men in the audience who were a half step away from getting off and terrifies them.

Carrie, too, is terrified, and the ingenious comedy of the moment gives way to concern for a young woman who was never told about this fact of life, reacting to her first period, well, the way any man would if he noticed blood coming out of his penis: she screams in terror and begs for help. The other teenagers, having already had their first periods and, more importantly, known about them before they even got them, mock her. The group, led by Chris (Nancy Allen), pelt the poor girl with tampons and shout, "Plug it up!" until the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) finally intervenes, but by then Carrie is so worked up that Miss Collins has to slap her to get the woman to stop hyperventilating and crying. Later, as the teacher discusses the event with the principal, Carrie can hear her sympathize with the other students, amazed that Carrie didn't know about periods.

Still, Miss Collins and the principal take pity on the girl, and they let her go home for the day and exchange vague glances and half-words about Carrie's home life. De Palma then cuts to Carrie's mother and instantly all questions about the poor young woman's insecurities are answered. Mrs. White (Piper Laurie) is a fundamentalist Christian, traveling around the neighborhood barking her rhetoric to uninterested parents about their hell-bound progeny. When both return home and Carrie tearfully recounts her day and asks why her mother never told her about menstruation, the old woman slaps her daughter and condemns "the curse of the blood" as punishment for sins. Before Carrie (or the audience) can bother to ask how sinful that must make the mother for having lived longer, the witch locks her daughter in a closet and forces her to pray for forgiveness. Carrie just can't catch a break.

De Palma, heretofore concerned with women only so far as voyeuristic targets (up to and including the credits of this film), suddenly offers a grim portrait of young womanhood. Other girls tease, boys ignore, and parents just don't understand. Oh, but there's a catch: Carrie has telekinetic powers. We all go through some pretty big changes in puberty.

Like Stephen King, who wrote the source novel to dispel accusations of his own macho fixation, De Palma uses the supernatural powers as an exaggerated take on biological growth. But De Palma refines some of the glut of King's novel, his first published and thus not the peak of his craft. He better captures the unfocused stress of adolescence, highlighting how the tiniest thing can drive Carrie to such nervous fright that a light bulb explodes or an ashtray flips over. Small actions all of them, but they build as the pressure mounts, until she finally reveals her powers to her mother in an emotional flash, causing the woman to denounce her daughter as an agent of Satan.

Spacek was the perfect choice to play Carrie. Certainly one of the most dependable and adventurous actresses ever, Spacek had already worked on a mixture of innocence and darker energy for her breakthrough in Terrence Malick's Badlands. Here, both sides of that dichotomy are further developed. To look upon Carrie is to pity her, a young woman who does not even need to take off the stereotypical glasses and let down her hair to be beautiful, but her mother has tortured her so much that Carrie believes herself to be worthless. Because she thinks this, the cruelty of youth is happy to cater to that perspective, with people like Chris enraged at Carrie for no discernible reason. Even Miss Collins joins in, reacting to the genuine remorse of Sue (Amy Irving), who tries to make up for teasing Carrie by encouraging her boyfriend (William Katt) to ask the nervous girl to prom, with distrust because she cannot imagine anyone being truly nice to Carrie without an ulterior motive. Yet Spacek can also turn 180 degrees with remarkable speed, and when Carrie starts to stand up for herself she becomes not-so-subtly intimidating before she finally snaps.

Spacek gives such a compelling performance that you might miss some of De Palma's usual cheekiness at first. Besides that wry opening shot, De Palma also gets out his kitsch in a tracking shot of all the cruel high school girls in Miss Collins' boot camp-esque detention. The director relocates the action from a Maine hamlet to the town of Bates, and Psycho references abound in the soundtrack, with screeching violins piercing the mix often. The goofy acting common in his films can be found in spades in the supporting roles, from Laurie's wildly melodramatic performance to the hilariously sleazy double act of Allen's Chris and her boyfriend (John Travolta in an early role). And when Chris and Billy prepare to sabotage Carrie's time at the prom by dumping pig's blood on her, De Palma draws out the suspense of the moment with a sequence that would feel excruciating without the slow-motion (but of course he uses it anyway). In his previous film, De Palma ended with an endlessly circling shot of reunited father and child, an overflow of emotion that made the first great argument for De Palma as a Romantic. Here, however, a similar shot, encircling Carrie and Tommy as they share a dance, comes before the end, the clear implication being that this is as good as it will get, and it's all downhill from this moment.

When the bucket of blood finally falls, De Palma shows just how far down it can go. Carrie's climactic breakdown is not so much scary as the creepiest comedy I've ever seen. With blood dripping down Carrie's head turning her homemade, white dress red, Spacek's face tightens in a rage as she imagines the stunned and silent crowd laughing at her. The corners of her mouth stretch back and her eyes bulge out as if she managed to tighten her eye sockets as well, and her vaguely amphibian appearance looks menacing instead of comical. Carrie then goes on a psychic rampage, killing all inside and dispatching Chris and Billy when they attempt to run her down in revenge. When she makes her way home, her mother will not even try to console her, attempting to kill her daughter to deliver her from Satan. Carrie responds by driving knives into her mom, and Mrs. White dies posed exactly like the crucifix she keeps in the house, a farcical piece of iconography with arrows sticking out of Christ's flesh and absurd eyes magnified to animé proportions to stress His pain. Leave it to De Palma to give us a fundamentalist whack-job accusing her daughter of Satanism only to have that young woman use a murder to purge her of Christ.

Even the "For Sale" sign planted in the collapsed and cleared wreckage of the White home (crushed by Carrie in guilt and grief) takes on a bizarrely Christian tone, doubling as a headstone for Carrie's smothered and buried corpse. That final scene, certainly the most infamous in the film, has appeared on various lists of the scariest moments in cinematic history. However, the shot of Carrie's hand reaching out of the ground to grab Sue in her dream is as funny as the opening sequence, one last "Boo!" moment that's as briefly frightening as someone sneaking up behind you and making you jump and as amusing to De Palma as such pranks are to the people who pull them. That playful attitude defines Carrie more than any outright horror, and it's amusing how this film, possibly the one De Palma is most known for -- it's either this or Scarface -- gives people a certain view of him as a director when it's not particularly any different than his previous features. But it's fitting, considering that the grand joke of the film is on those who buy the scares at surface value.

Crumb

Crumb is one of the most profoundly disturbing horror films ever made. That it is a documentary about a comic book artist makes no difference. If anything, the fact that what the films shows us is real only deepens the level of discomfort, and the opening title card, attributing the film first not to the director or the subject but producer David Lynch is but the first clue that this story will bring with it the sort of homegrown horror lurking beneath the surfaces of all of Lynch's work.

The actual director, Terry Zwigoff, made a film about Robert Crumb, iconic (and iconoclastic) underground comics pioneer, solely off the back of his standing relationship with Crumb. Had Zwigoff not already been friends with the artist, there's no way he could have so completely captured the life of such a fame-averse man. (One of the film's first scenes, after all, shows the mustachioed, cheap-suited man speaking before a group of students and slamming his own work for becoming adopted by the mainstream -- specifically his Fritz the Cat comic, his album cover for Big Brother and Holding Company's Cheap Thrills, and his "Keep on Truckin'" panel that became a bumper sticker.)

Or maybe not. Part of what's both compelling and repelling about Crumb's art is how completely candid it is. As he notes in the film, he draws what comes to his mind as it comes to mind, and a great deal of his work features an interpretation of himself, an interpretation that always depicts the poor man as a wiry, unloved freak scarcely capable of controlling his sexual desires. Indeed, in the flesh, the seeming recluse opens up without provocation. He calmly discusses his sexual hangups, his process, his traumatic upbringing, and Zwigoff slowly pieces together not simply a portrait of a loopy counterculture figure but a complex rumination on the nature of art as both a therapeutic tool and a sign of psychological implosion.

"If I don't draw for a while I get crazy. Depressed and suicidal.," Crumb says of his need to work. "But then, some nights when I'm drawing, I feel suicidal too, so..." That paradox is immediately evident in his work, so filled with contradictions that Zwigoff cannot hope to unpack them all. Is his work empowering or misogynistic? Liberating or repressed? Is R. Crumb "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century" as a Time art critic asserts (or "the Daumier of our time" as another admirer gushes) or is he simply a skeevy outcast sketching cartoon pornography, unable to move past a childhood fixation and fetishization of Bugs Bunny?

Zwigoff attempts to dig into these questions for a time, setting up Robert Hughes, the art critic, on one end of the spectrum defending Crumb's work with veracity, and placing Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones magazine, on the opposite end. Though he does include one wry cutaway from Crumb dismissing the charges that his work is racist by attributing such remarks entirely to white liberals to the white, middle-class English ranting about Crumb, the director refreshingly does not set up opposition to his friend's work as the screeching whines of the P.C. police. English is articulate, prepared and, most importantly, measured, not lambasting Crumb but speaking of his work with an almost sadness, as if she feels that, were he to change just a few things, he truly would be as brilliant as his supporters think.

Monetary problems limited the range of Zwigoff's talking heads, but English and Hughes make for terrific counterweights, and only those with continued personal relationships with Crumb pass in-between them. Old girlfriends and his wife, Aline, speak gratefully of Robert's art, thrilled that Crumb, with his extreme fixation on Amazonian women with big thighs and buttocks, depicting a vision of female beauty outside stick figures with DD racks. But even they occasionally question some aspects of Crumb's work, and their conflicted feelings over Crumb's style provide a more wholesome idea of the beauty and revulsion in his oeuvre than proposed celebrity fans could have elaborated upon (though I share in Roger Ebert's disappointment that Steve Martin, with his deep knowledge of comedy and satire, could not appear to speak of how much Crumb's comics influenced him).

Without the clutter of too many talking heads, however, Zwigoff can simply follow Robert around town, and in the process he avoids falling into the trap of endlessly debating and celebrating the artwork and focus on what drives the man. Crumb, always clad in a tacky suit and a straw spring hat, looks as if he's spent his life following Tom Waits around on tour, and he laughs off any association with the hippie movement. One can scarcely imagine this man, seemingly trapped in some satiric costume of '50s life, hanging out with the freaks around the Haight-Ashbury, and he even slams the Grateful Dead's sonic ramblings, preferring to kick back with his extensive collection of moldy 78s of early-20th century blues. For him, the hippies were just as subject to herd mentality as the conformist society they supposedly rejected, and he feels similarly about the modern rap culture, which he feels manipulates the righteous anger of its consumer base into buying all sorts of brand clothing instead of inspiring them.

Crumb comes off as deliciously sarcastic about the whole affair, deadpanning his wife's mention of his shyness and discomfort with strangers with, "That's what makes me such a great subject for a movie." Despite his goofy, awkward charm, Crumb reveals a great deal of loathing, not just at all those aforementioned trends he trashes but toward himself. One of the most deeply uncomfortable moments of the film shows the artist in a photo shoot surrounded by nubile young models. Zwigoff reveals in the commentary that the studio was hot and most of the women were lesbians, but Crumb likely would have looked as strained and disinterested had they all been infatuated with him. He prefers to handle his repression through his art rather than confront it directly; all of his former partners plainly discuss how strange he is in bed.

And yet, Crumb doesn't look so bad when compared to his family, who in many ways are the focal point of the documentary more than Robert. Having spent some time in Crumb's family home in the '70s, Zwigoff manages to get a camera in there to document Robert's older brother Charles, who got Robert and youngest brother Maxon drawing as children to deal with their abusive father and drugged-out mother. The director clearly wanted Charles as much as he did Robert, and the image we get of Robert's older brother serves to deepen the film's survey of art as a means of expression.

Just like the underground icon, both Charles and Maxon are incredible artists, and just like Robert their work is infused with their sexual hangups. Charles started drawing Disney cartoons before moving on to more perverted subjects, and Maxon also turned to painting his fetishes. As Zwigoff spends time with them, a question arises: how could one family be so warped? Even Robert's two sisters, who declined to be interviewed for the film, carry their sexual scars, Robert having described one as a "separatist lesbian," so militantly misandrist that the only man she allows in her home is her son. One cannot look upon Robert's brothers without horror: Maxon turned to molestation in his teens to act out his repression, and now he practices celibacy altogether because the prospect of sex sends him into epileptic seizures. He also engages in an insane form of ritual, sitting on a bed of nails for hours each day, begging not for money but as part of the routine, and passing a long strip of cloth through his digestive system once a month. Though he does not belong to any faith, his lifestyle mirrors that of a disturbingly devoted monk.

And then there's Charles. The snippets of information we receive of the Crumb brothers' father hints at trauma the boys faced -- his career as a military man and as a employee motivation trainer suggests a genesis for Robert's hatred of Establishment conformity. But we also sense that Charles, as much as being the child most tortured by the upbringing, also enacted brutality of his own. He forced his brothers to draw to match his own childhood passion for comics, and Maxon appears to be as uncomfortable thinking about his elder brother as he does his parents. Robert, too, bears some scars, and he titters nervously in Charles' presence as the man, practically catatonic from tranquilizers and antidepressants, flatly discusses old fantasies of murdering his younger brother with an axe. Trapped in his mother's home, having never left, Charles still tries to live a bit off his status as the eldest brother, teasing Robert for never getting any dates in high school even though he himself has never had sex. Charles notes that he used to be handsome, but now he sports greasy hair, stubble and rotted teeth, skin clammy from unwashed sweat. At last all becomes clear: for all the legitimate, intriguing debates over the merits and madness in Robert Crumb's art, he's the only one in the family who managed to adequately get a handle on his mental instability. As he lovingly watches over his young daughter Sophie and proudly advises Jesse, his son from his first marriage, over the boy's drawing, Robert looks normal and fairly contented, more so when he trades some sketchbooks for a house in France.

Charles is the counterpoint, not only to Robert but to the idea that art is a means of therapy. Looking over Charles' old sketchbooks without the man nearby, Robert drops his nervous giggle and speaks with deep sadness as he scans over his brother's childhood brilliance. Charles was cleverer, more driven and a better drawer, but he never progressed, returning over and over to his love of the movie Treasure Island and his sexual obsession with young Bobby Driscoll. Reflecting his childlike fixation, Charles never moved on to ink, sticking with pencil and crayon etchings. Then, something went wrong. As Robert flips through the final book Charles penciled, the drawings begin to feature a wrinkle effect in every panel, concentric lines wrapping around each object. Robert continues flipping, and the words in the speech bubbles begin dominating the panels, edging out all white space not already filled by the wrinkles. Finally, the book becomes just text, then simply coiled scribbles of asemic writing. It is one of the single most haunting shots I've ever seen: if the final shot of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up was as beautiful and poetic a summary of art's capacity to heal, inspire and better, then this close-up, on a sheet of gibberish, is the flip-side. Sometimes, art isn't the release of madness but the exhibition of it, a solar flare that belches some of the artist's insanity out of him before being reabsorbed as the effects of the aberration disturb the surrounding area. Crumb is a hopeful and witty film, spotlighting a man who fought his way to sanity through psychosis, but it also demonstrates how art can consume its vessel, leaving him or her worse off than before. Charles Crumb committed suicide before the film's release.